The course addresses the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and offers PhD candidates theoretical and methodological tools to critically analyse space and its cultural significance from an interdisciplinary perspective and across time periods.

The course offers a comprehensive overview of questions related to space, memory and the past, and works within an interdisciplinary framework to consider how these three concepts intersect and have been used for purposes ranging from positive creation of communal narratives to violent exclusion of ‘others’.

This course examines how social relations and identities are determined by the spatial organisation of social life. During this course doctoral students analyse how different types of spaces constitute and project group and individual identities, and through them allow for and enforce different social structures, social discourses, linguistic borders, as well as a sense of community but also social unrest.

During a one-week workshop on location in Rome, the course participants will practice their skills in analysing the social and cultural roles of urban and rural spaces.

This is the first and introductory course within the theme and deals with different theoretical and methodological frameworks in order to investigate the complexities regarding identity, corporeality, language, place, ethnicity and other differences in relation to the new global zones of contact.

The course addresses the emergence of new global – often temporary – linguistic communities and associated communicative practices, and examines how these communities are formed by and through different languages.

The course introduces the second year of the theme and addresses issues relating to the displacement and separation resulting from increased mobility and its consequences, both in terms of social and linguistic categories such as “semi-lingualism” and different linguistically creative approaches to resistance and diversity.

The course covers both traditional and new (e.g. academic) diasporas, the emergence of creoles and World Englishes. Within the course, students will explore different issues through empirical analysis of data related to various language phenomena.

The course explores and problematizes the role the human plays in the long term changes we are witnessing on our planet today. It also highlights the ways in which the humanities increasingly make use of the concept of the Anthropocene to question and challenge nature-culture dichotomies as well as the presumed exceptionalism of the human.

The course engages critically with posthuman theories, asking questions such as: How to understand and engage the spaces and networks that take place between the human and the more-than-human? How do they affect our perception of environmental challenges on a global scale, our reading of history and ethics?

In what ways can research contribute to change through imagining and engaging with the environment and civic society? The course aims to facilitate ethical engagement through the use of different creative and innovative methods in order to develop creative skills and strategies to communicate one’s research.

The course “Methods” deals with issues relating to philology – both as an historical phenomenon and as a current and transcultural method – in addition to archival research methods, textual criticism, and current methods of literary interpretation.

The course ”Translation” deals with the literary dimensions of translation, multilingualism and reception. There will be special emphasis on cultural and sociological aspects of translation, and on how these affect the mutability of literary texts across times and places.

The course “Texts in Transit” deals with culture- and language-specific aspects of textual enquiry, as well as “bibliomigrancy”, that is the ways in which books circulate globally, gather in libraries and acquire material presence as versions of “world literature” in discrete public spheres.

The aims of the course are for the student to identify and explore a context in which materiality is significant for their doctoral research, and to produce a publishable research article on this topic. The course takes the form of a workshop to which a pair of internationally recognised researchers will be invited as mentors and as a sounding board.

The Faculty’s continuous operations should include four specialisations, here referred to as themes. These themes should be broad enough to benefit doctoral students from a wide range of fields, and narrow enough to enable the participating doctoral students to engage in a substantial academic exchange with each other.